


Ashes Remain

by UnrepentantFangirl



Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Avengers: Infinity War Part 1 (Movie) Spoilers, Gen, Grief/Mourning, Post-Avengers: Infinity War Part 1 (Movie), Steve Rogers Feels
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-04-30
Updated: 2018-04-30
Packaged: 2019-04-30 02:25:55
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 640
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14486760
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/UnrepentantFangirl/pseuds/UnrepentantFangirl
Summary: Set immediately Post-Infinity War, spoilers ahead!After everything settles, Steve is left reeling. He deals, grieving his losses and looking for a way forward.





	Ashes Remain

_ Ashes to ashes, dust to dust.  _

 

Death is always standing there with Steve. An old friend, following him from decade to decade, war to war. He’d lost nearly everyone he’d ever cared about once and it had nearly broken him. When it happens this time something in his mind just switches off. 

 

The logical part of his brain knows its shock. Bucky, dust in his fingertips, ashes in the wind. Thanos gone. T’Challa and Wanda, Sam and Vision all dead. Tony still missing. He had felt himself go numb, brain desperately trying to process it. 

 

_ They had lost. All of them had lost. Half of the universe, gone in a snap. _

 

A fire burns deep inside, banked for now down to coals. Waiting to rise to the challenge. The world reels. Steve reels, clinging to the people left to him. Natasha, Bruce, Rhodey, Thor. The ones who hadn’t disappeared in a flash. 

 

As though they had never even existed in the first place. 

 

Days pass, and Steve still feels the world off balance. He already knows no amount of alcohol can dull this ache. This failure to fulfill his promise as the Captain. His nights are spent laying on a bed staring at the ceiling, days spent trying to do anything to fill the moments. 

 

_ There is no plan. Not yet.  _

 

Two weeks later, Tony is found at the edge of the barrier wall. Haggard, half dead, but alive. Actually, alive. Steve can barely believe it, even if the last time they saw each other he’d left Tony behind bleeding and wounded to the core. They were friends once. Now they are comrades of a different kind, the losses brands that have left them scarred. The people they lost carved out of them, leaving behind wounds of a different kind. 

 

_ As the shock fades to grief, the fire banked deep inside of him starts to come back to life.  _

 

Their losses only grow by the day as the world tries to cope. Millions gone. If he looked up he could see the lists of the dead growing. But he can’t. Because this cannot go un dealt with. No. Thanos cannot be allowed to live. 

 

Tony, Bruce, and Shuri spend hours in her lab. Sometimes Steve can hear them yelling from out in the hallways. They are like a dog with a bone, picking and gnawing at it. A tangled thread that must be untangled before it can be dealt with. 

 

The fury builds inside of him day by day. He lost Bucky once, to snow and a train and decades of terror. This is worse. This time he has a target to focus that rage and drive upon. Thanos will not survive what is coming for him. 

_ Maybe Steve won’t survive it either. That’s a risk he’s willing to take.  _

 

At the nineteen day mark the scientists emerge from their lab. There is a manic fire burning in Tony’s eyes and Steve doesn’t miss it. Same way he doesn’t miss the circles under Bruce’s eyes, or the cautious optimism in Shuri’s. 

 

“We know where he went.” Her voice is quieter than it was a few weeks ago. More subdued. But it isn’t the broken echo it had been the day after the ashing. Vengeance burns in his blood. 

 

_ He is a weapon honed to a deadly edge.  _

 

It sounds insane. Hunting down Thanos on another planet, taking the fight back to him. They had lost too much to stay put. If it killed him, he’d put that monster in the ground. He had nothing left to lose. His team was gone. The world was in pieces. 

 

If the best he could do was send Thanos screaming into the void, then he would do it. It wouldn’t bring them back. Not any of them. But it was something. It was something. 


End file.
